Deadline: 10-Feb-23
The Africa Digital Financial Inclusion Facility (ADFI) seeks to accelerate access to finance for women businesses (WSMEs) by leveraging data and technology through a program that will intervene across five (5) countries (Cameroon, Egypt, Kenya, Mozambique and Nigeria) selected from the five(5) regions across Africa.
To support design and implementation of the program ADFI is launching a request for expressions of interest (REOI) from consulting firms with experience in providing innovative financial services solutions with emphasis on WSMEs.
The Africa Digital Financial Inclusion Facility (ADFI) aims to remove barriers to the growth and use of digital financial solutions to accelerate financial inclusion in Africa.
ADFI was launched in 2019 by the African Development Bank in partnership with the Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation (BMGF), the French Development Agency (AfD), the Ministry of Finance, Government of Luxembourg, joined by the Ministry of Economy and Finance, France and the Women’s Enterprise Finance Initiative (We-Fi) in 2020 and 2022 respectively.
The program that will be executed in partnership with key institutions, will facilitate the development of responsive digital financial services that will help an estimated 8,000 WSMEs improve their operational efficiency, access to finance, business resilience and recovery from the impact of COVID-19. The program through the technical support funding from both We-Fi and ADFI seeks to mobilise increased access to credit for WSMEs from the private sector.
Pillars
The facility works through three main pillars namely:
- Digital infrastructure
- Policy and regulation
- Products and innovation with gender inclusion and capacity building as cross cutting themes.
Funding Information
- Financing between USD 5,000 and USD 1 million
- Sales between USD 50,000 and USD 15 million.
Areas of Interventions
- Partnership Building – Identify and develop partnerships for the project working with the AfDB through ADFI and the Affirmative Finance Action for Women in Africa (AFAWA).
- Identification of the WSMEs target pool – to be included in the in-country projects
- Human centred design (HCD) and research – identify needs of WSMEs, link to digital financial services (DFS) providers and facilitate development of relevant DFS to WMSEs.
- Digital financial solutions design – Facilitate the design of digital credit; and complementary digital solutions such as insurance.
- Prototyping and Testing – Testing different digital credit instruments; business processes associated with the credit access; and linking the testing of the digital credit solutions to the WSMEs pool identified at the HCD level.
- Facilitating Go-live/Go-to Market Strategy (GTM) – Work with the WSMEs and the partners on the design and execution of GTM strategy.
- Capacity Building – Support the coaching and mentoring of WSMEs in business skills, financial and digital literacy; and capacity building of stakeholders.
- The consultancy firm is therefore expected to implementthe following key tasks working closely and collaboratively with ADFI/AfDB teams:
- Set-up a project team including the respective in-country project managers.
- Producean inception report that covers the proposed approach per country.
- Identification of potential stakeholders per country.
- Undertake stakeholder meetings and workshops in the respective countries and propose partnership arrangements per country.
- Support the formalisation of the partnerships.
- Develop detailed project proposals per country andproject plans covering the strategic and operational issues.
- Develop risk registers per country for the proposed project and actively manage the mitigation.
- Design and execute HCD end-to-end processes and disseminate the results.
- Work with partners to design the credit solutions.
- Support and manage the pilot and go-to market.
Evaluation/Selection Criteria
- Academic and professional qualifications of the proposed team
- Subject-matter experience and track record of the company
- Previous experience on designing programs and projects for WSMEs that facilitate access to finance; experience in digital financial solutions
- Experience within Africa and the target countries
- Operations in the target countries.
For more information, visit ADFI.